


Last Train to Somewhere

by NervousAsexual



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Half-Life Secret Santa 2020, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28207248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Barney used to look forward to train rides.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun/Gordon Freeman
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	Last Train to Somewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aresenolite](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=aresenolite).



When he was a kid Barney would take the train from Little Rock to Lillian, Ohio to visit his paternal grandmother every July. Barney, being the youngest grandchild, was the favored grandchild. Nana Calhoun loved to pinch his face and crow about how much he had grown and fix all his favorite snacks, which meant that by the time he returned to Arkansas in August he had eaten roughly half his weight in baklava. Visiting her was something he looked forward to all year.

Like most nanas his took an awkward interest in his love life. The summer he turned thirteen she asked him if he'd met any nice girls yet in his study group.

"I guess," he'd answered, misinterpreting the question in the way only an adolescent boy could.

"I knew you would." Nana Calhoun beamed at him. "All the nice girls would want my little Barney."

"Um..." Barney said.

"Come sit with me, _kapara_. You can tell me all about them."

She continued to ask the same question every year until he dropped out of college to take the job at Black Mesa. That year he called her and told her all about the hapless scientists he worked with and the tram system that reminded him of those summer train rides to Ohio and the nerdy new guy he'd befriended and...

As she always did Nana Calhoun listened without speaking until he was finished infodumping. Then she asked, "This Gordon boy... Is he Jewish?"

"What? I don't know. Maybe?"

"Hm." He could almost hear her shaking her head. "I suppose he will have to do. He makes good money? You could stay home and take care of my great-grandbabies?"

For a moment he just nodded as he usually did when he was listening. Then her words swooped through his brain and walloped him upside the head. "What?"

"Let's be reasonable; you don't make very good money, my love."

The gears in his head ground away. "Why would I come back to babysit? I have a job here, and Lauren..."

"I'm not talking about Lauren's babies, _kapara_. I'm talking about the babies you and Gordon will adopt."

He babbled incoherently at that. Why in the hell would he and Gordon... What was she...

Somehow Nana Calhoun knew before he did that he had it bad for Gordon, and he had her blessing. He told her that he wasn't interested in dating and anyway he was mostly straight and he didn't want kids for a long, long time.

"I know this. But one day you might. I want to know that you will be with someone who will take good care of you."

He sputtered and blustered. He liked Gordon well enough, but he didn't like him that way, and anyway he had no plans to live the traditional married-with-children life.

"Alright, alright, my love. Whatever life you live I will be proud of you. I only want you to be happy. What is your dorm number? I'm going to send you a care package."

She did send the care package--socks she'd knitted specially for him in red and black yarn, a roll of quarters for the laundry room, and, of course, a reused margarine tub stuffed full of baklava. It was the last care package she sent to him, and she died three weeks later.

Four years later Barney, relocation ticket clenched in his fist, rides the train to City 17 and thinks of her.

The train is crowded but deathly silent and it makes him think of those long-ago train rides to Ohio and how quiet they would be in the early mornings as they pulled out of Little Rock. He used to doze for the first hour or so with only the clacking of the railroad ties and the occasionally muffled call of the horn lulling him to sleep. The Combine's trains aren't so very different. If he closes his eyes he can pretend he's just going north to visit his nana.

His hands sweat and the cheap ink on the relocation ticket bleeds into his palm but he barely notices. In a few hours he will start an entirely new life, one he has done everything possible to avoid.

It will help, Eli says. Any information he can get them is better than no information at all. And he understands that, he truly does, but it doesn't stop him from freezing up every few minutes and wishing he could just get off the train and go back. He can't do it. He can't do what needs to be done as a metrocop and live with himself afterward. He wants...

He wants none of this to have happened.

He wants the traditional married-life-with-children.

Sometimes he forgets. In his dreams he will be sitting at a little kitchen table in a little house and there will be a little girl on his lap and he will be reading off the back of a cereal box that has the entire Truth About Aliens book that he used to own on the back. The little girl looks like Alyx because he was the baby of the family and she's the only kid he ever spent much time with, and she follows along on the cereal box with her chubby little hands.

And then he'll dream that the front door will open and there he'll see Gordon, looking as scruffy as ever and tugging at the tie Black Mesa makes him wear, but Gordon will look up at them and smile that warm broad smile that has always been so cute on him. He'll sign something like, _My two favorite people_ , and he'll ruffle the little girl's hair and he'll kiss Barney like he does it every day without thinking.

And Barney, whose relocation ticket is illegible, the name of a high school classmate long since smudged off onto his hand, finds himself crying on the train to City 17.

He doesn't want the married-with-kids life. He wants to go out with Gordon for a beer and watch old sci-fi movies on the couch together and call his nana just to hear her voice, but he'd take the married-with-kids life over this. He'd take almost anything.


End file.
